Also refers to the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency, an arm of the U.S. Government This organization, headed by red-headed firebrand Admiral James Sandecker, is ostensibly tasked with coordinating the nation's oceanographic research, and carrying out particularly difficult bits of it. One of our own noders takes his name from their head computer guru.

This organization is part science club, part commando team, part military, part covert-ops specialists, full-time romantics and most-of-the-time secret agents. Their star employee is one Air Force Major Dirk Pitt, whose not-so-subtly coital name hides - or rather, reveals - a character worthy of its sheer brashness. As his creator tells us, Mr. Pitt is dark-haired, green-eyed, and unassuming looking, save for the fact that women find him irresistable and villains find him fearsome.

In any case, NUMA made its first chronological appearance in the book titled The Mediterranean Caper or Mayday! depending on which edition you have. The first story written concerning Dirk Pitt and NUMA was, according to the author, the novel known as Pacific Vortex.

NUMA has lots of cool toys, ranging from corporate jets to submersibles to research ships to holographic comm systems. They were one of the first users of the Iridium satellite telephone system, and we can probably consider the 'rescue' of Iridium to service 20,000 otherwise unidentified 'Government subscribers' to be their mysterious hand and budget at work.

They might be considered to be the wet-dream boyhood fantasy of those who work at the real-life and much more mundane (although much more important) NOAA, or National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency.

National Underwater & Marine Agency

NUMA is a non-profit organization founded in 1979 by Dr. Clive Cussler. Named after the fictional NUMA in Dr. Cussler's novels; NUMA searches for historically significant shipwrecks.

The NUMA mission:

The National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) is a 501C3 non-profit, volunteer foundation dedicated to preserving our maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts.

Our purpose is also to reinforce public appreciation of our marine past, present and future by initiating and supporting projects designed to uncover and explore historically significant shipwrecks before they are lost and gone forever.

Our goals include the protection of these historic sites through public information programs and to make available archaeological reports and data on technical expertise while perpetuating the names and legends of the sea-loving men and women who came before us.

NUMA does not actively seek private funding. Most of the financial support for the projects comes from the royalties from Clive Cussler's books.

Dr. Cussler and Craig Dirgo have written The Sea Hunters, his first non-fiction novel, about twelve of the sites explored by NUMA.

Among their finds:

http://www.numa.net/

In computer circles, stands for Non Uniform Memory Architecture, it is a MIMD type of machine. An SMP computer has one central memory and is a Uniform Memory Architecture, in that every processor has the same access to memory (which is why it's called symmetric). A NUMA machine has several processors, each with their own memory and the ability to talk to one another's memory. However, the ability to do so is non-uniform. Usually it is non-uniform in that it is not direct, as fast, and of as high of a priority. Whereas it is fairly easy to balance loads on an SMP machine, it is not so on a NUMA machine. Things such as locality of data and "promiscuity" of data must be taken in to account. The first NUMA machine was the Cm*, which was made 50 lsl-11 microprocessors. Should caching on remote memory be used, it is called ccNUMA.

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